Mesh Simplification Tools?

But it has 5500 triangles, which is a few too many for a game that should run on a Rage 128

Are there any free tools for Mac OS X which can reduce the polygon count of my model? I found a free mesh decimation tool (http://meshalgorithms.sourceforge.net/) on OpenGL.org/Sourceforge.net, but, to put it bluntly, it sucked.

Leave the Rage 128 behind and look to the future. I would say shoot for a Geforce 2MX but good GOD that is old as dirt to! Anyway just wanted to say nice model. Looks good! What will the textures look like?

Even the GeForce2MX is going to have problems with multiple 5K-poly animated characters on-screen at once. I don't want to abandon the Rage 128 until the majority of casual gamers have upgraded, which is probably still 2-3 years off.

I suspect that you could build this guy with well under 1000 tris without sacrificing much of his basic sillhouette.

Some thoughts, short of finding a good automatic way to do this:

If you must keep this version of the model, I'd just start collapsing edges manually, taking down contiguous rows of quads where possible. You'd be surprised how quick that goes.

Focus on the legs and tail, which could have five or six faces, and on the broad, flat expanses of his sides and chest, which represent some very oblique angles that are probably too subtle for your budget.

Alternatively, think about rebuilding from scratch. To make it easier, take screenshots on the X and Z axes and import them as TIFs to use as guides for the general shape.

I usually find it useful, when aiming for low polycounts, to work from a cube, extruding and adding detail as necessary, rather than cobbling together more complex primitives.

The problem is, you have the model as you see it in the wireframe at the top of the thread, but that needs to be subdivided to produce the image on the right-hand-side; then that needs to be triangulated to be useful for a game.

Maybe I could pick and choose which polygons to subdivide and do OK that way by hand...